Google recently announced their plans to encrypt search results for all logged-in users by stripping the search query from the referral string. (See Conductor’s POV on its impact to search marketing.)

Google is claiming a “single-digit percentage” as the fully ramped estimate of logged-in users. Search Engine Land most recently reported up to 14% of search traffic coming from Google as encrypted. To expand on their analysis, we analyzed more than 1.7 million visits from five high traffic websites. We analyzed traffic in the days following the change, October 19- November 2nd by measuring the percentage of natural traffic coming to the sites from Google with the Analytics token ‘not provided’, which, according to the Google Analytics blog is the new way encrypted natural search traffic will be identified. We then tracked the percentage of ‘not provided’ natural search traffic day over day.

Encrypted Traffic Grows to 6.5% of Google Search Visits

The analysis showed up until Sunday, October 30th less than 1/10 of 1% of natural search traffic was impacted, but by Monday, October 31st that grew to 2.5% and spiked to 6.5% by Wednesday, November 2nd. This trend suggests Google is continuing to roll out the change gradually but we are not quite seeing some of the numbers being thrown around.

Nathan is the Director of Research at Conductor and leads Conductor’s research and content team. Nathan is a monthly columnist at Search Engine Land and Search Engine Watch. Nathan’s research on digital marketing has been widely covered in both industry publications and mainstream media such as Techcrunch, Venture Beat and the Washington Post. Prior to joining Conductor, Nathan was an analyst at Forrester Research.